The best of all worlds...

[Master_Darque]

If the AI keeps changing the trade routes every turn. is there a way to prevent the AI from removing its trade routes? If so, to regain some balance, the AI might be allowed to break a trade route only if it is pirated...

[Immortal Wombat]

Thank goodness this thread hit page 2...

Originally posted by Locutus
IW,
That would be great, actually Tile imps and/or terrain are currently our best chance when it comes to city expansion. It'll still be a while before we (or at least I, someone might beat me to it) get around to actually implementing that feature but it is extremely useful that you already made (some of) the graphics...

I've done the rest into graphics, but I've hit a stumbling block on converting them into tile files. It keeps showing up roads instead of the suburbs when I place them via the map editor. I'll try by SLIC tomorrow, and probably email Martin (bV) about it.

[Lou Wigman]

A comment about game length.

I can see no reason to limit this to 500 turns. There is a 'natural' limit to the game anyway. Depending on the difficulty setting and your skill a point is reached where you have clearly won the game. Thats it.

For me playing Cradle at impossible level this is usually reached around 1500 AD. Whether coincidental or not this usually coincides with the 'Industrialisation' advance. I am a glutton and desperately want to keep playing but clearly there is no point. This is why I suggested that AI civs be merged. For those of us who just can't get enough that is. 'Merging' in my view should only occur once or twice and only when the human player is clearly on top. The purpose, for me at least, is to breathe new life into my opponents and let me keep playing. Unlike some I just don't get bored. (There is certainly merit in merging civs to spice up the game a little and introduce some randomness but this could be overdone.)

Whilst I like the time scale in Cradle it might be appropriate to shorten the BC part of the game a little. Perhaps remove one generation of military units.

In relation to the 'Disasters' MOD I turned this off because all the events were negative and quite extreme. Cradle is a slow growth MOD and it is quite a struggle to get your cities to size 6 or so. To have them wiped back to size 3 is a major catastrophy. There needs to be good events as well as bad events but they should be less extreme. (Losing half your population in one stroke ? - next...)

[Immortal Wombat]

Originally posted by Lou Wigman
In relation to the 'Disasters' MOD I turned this off because all the events were negative and quite extreme. Cradle is a slow growth MOD and it is quite a struggle to get your cities to size 6 or so. To have them wiped back to size 3 is a major catastrophy. There needs to be good events as well as bad events but they should be less extreme. (Losing half your population in one stroke ? - next...)

If you got the update, last month some time, the maximum you can now lose at one stroke is 1/5 I think, except perhaps if a force 8 earth quake hits directly on a city - happens like once in 20 games.

[hexagonian]

Originally posted by Lou Wigman
A comment about game length.

Whilst I like the time scale in Cradle it might be appropriate to shorten the BC part of the game a little. Perhaps remove one generation of military units.

What you can do is take a calculator and go into Advances.txt and reduce the cost of each advance by a set amount (20-33% each), or you can do it for a group of advances in a particular age. It's about 20 minutes of work.

[hexagonian]

Originally posted by Immortal Wombat
How exactly? The code's written, I think we just need playtesters to balance the probabilities and triggers.

If it is ready to post, go ahead.

BTW, have you seen LOTR yet???

[Immortal Wombat]

Originally posted by hexagonian
If it is ready to post, go ahead.

I did. In the superpowers thread.

BTW, have you seen LOTR yet???

Yes. Fantastic images, fairly decent to the story

[Locutus]

Originally posted by Master_Darque
If the AI keeps changing the trade routes every turn. is there a way to prevent the AI from removing its trade routes? If so, to regain some balance, the AI might be allowed to break a trade route only if it is pirated...

That's exactly what I was thinking. SLIC seems to have some functions for it but AFAIK these haven't been used before so it remains to be seen how well they work...

Thanks, Ben, I hope you get them to work.

Originally posted by Lou Wigman
I can see no reason to limit this to 500 turns. There is a 'natural' limit to the game anyway. Depending on the difficulty setting and your skill a point is reached where you have clearly won the game. Thats it.

True, but if a game is designed to cover all of human history from 4000 BCE to 2300 CE and 80% of the games are over before 1700 CE, there's something wrong with your design... (see Reynolds article) Even the best players should at least have to use modern units to win (or at least to ensure victory). The way I see it: if you can win without having to research any Genetic age techs, good for you, but winning before discovering tanks or flight is IMHO something that should be rare.

I am a glutton and desperately want to keep playing but clearly there is no point. This is why I suggested that AI civs be merged.

And that's exactly why I want that feature too

Whilst I like the time scale in Cradle it might be appropriate to shorten the BC part of the game a little. Perhaps remove one generation of military units.

I agree, but the plan is to use MedMod as basis for this mod, that already has a reasonably sized BC part IMHO (though some tweaking might still be required, we'll have to see about that).

About disasters: I want both positive and negative effects and I don't want them to be too powerful so I don't think there should be any problem there.

BTW, I just received a shipment of LEGO from Denmark, so don't be surprised if I'm not working on this mod very hard for the next few days (Don't even ask... let's just say that studying Computer Science is a lot more fun than it sounds )

[child of Thor]

Having read all the above and had time to play a few games and think about the suggestions i'd like to add my thoughts.
Civs that get too far ahead need to be slowed down
Most of the issues have been covered well, and I’d like to add to some of the main ones.

1.More crime/more unhappiness as cities get further away from capitol and larger - this is good but give the player an option to do something about it, if they can afford it (extra units (police/MP's etc) and or improvements to counter some of these effects).

2.Newly conquered cities harder to keep under control. For X amount of turns it could be a requirement to have 1 military unit per X citizens (although this could be difficult on very large cities) or some such thing. Forcing the aggressor to garrison troops is a realistic option, and slows down mass-conquest of very weak civs.

3.Random disasters. These are great if not too harsh (I liked getting 'plague' in Cradle-it was quite harsh but realistic for the time) and maybe you could even code a trigger for large civ specific disasters; outbreaks of new disease's (HIV), environmental demonstrations (increases unhappiness), Ban the Bomb (CND) etc the list could be quite long (and fun – forcing the player to care about his civ more). Maybe the terrorist attacks could fall into this 'Random' large civ disaster category?

4.If one civ is running away with the game (huge amount of production / pollution, lots of cities, lots of recent conquests) then the other civs that have contact with this civ and are not allied with this civ or on good terms, should be forced into alliances/pacts with each other and set about attacking that largest civ. The difficulty could be in deciding were to draw the line on this. Maybe a very aggressive expansionist leading civ, with lots of newly conquered cities should force all the other nearest civ's to ally and wage war
against it. Those not so near the action could say embargo goods, cancel trade routes. I think losing a lot of 'reputation' points is a must if one civ is
particularly aggressive. In real life this is so.

5.Wonders.I love wonders, I build lots even if I don't get a return. I just like them, they add uniqueness to my civ. But I would like to be slightly limited in what I can build-that way they really are wonders. I think you should let a player build as many as he/she likes, don't limit a player’s choice! But you could say only build X amount in any one city, this would be a limit in its self. I tend to get one or two 'production' cities in my early to middling civ and churn out most of the wonders from these, so putting a cap on each individual city will still give the player the option of building anything he wants - he'll just
have to pay a lot for it! (in building up production infrastructure in more than a few cities)

6.Repairing units-how about a unit (medic?) or tile improvement (field Hospital?) that you can use/build anywhere. tactically you would want to protect this unit/tile as it would be vital in your supply line as a conquering civ. It of course could become a focus for counter attack, as it would (and should) disrupt your conquest. Still keep pw/gold as a slow regeneration but to quickly heal in the field is vital to an army. Just make the units/improvements expensive to build and maintain to keep some balance there.

7. Trade/sell units. If this could work it would be very useful and powerful! if the AI could cope with it, then it could be worth doing or all you'll be doing is giving the human player another chance to get further ahead(trade to civ's that are weaker but at war with a strong rival) IF the AI can do the same then
it would be excellent.

8. Unconventional warfare- these options should be fleshed out especially in the postindustrial age, with more units/improvements/techs to counter each other. e.g. spec-forces (SAS etc) to target units (and each other),sabotage infrastructure and fight very well. ‘INT’ advances to quell unrest (MI5 building?), steal tech from enemy civ’s. A lot could be added and balanced (in a non-programming sense!) against each other.

9. Trade goods/Tiles as strategic resources- I think Civ3 has gone a bit too far with this (I mean one bit of coal on a continent!), but the idea is great. I was messing around with the idea of needing certain things to gain certain units/improvements/advances (besides discovering the advance). Say I need wood and stone (or whatever the comparable for the terrain-camel/elephant for desert) before I can build a warrior unit. This gives me a few more things to think about/organise/trade for. If you have these trade goods/tiles close by then great – if not you will have to fight/trade/expand to get them. The example above I’m not entirely happy with but I hope it conveys that it would need to be reasonably realistic (wood for the axe handle, stone for the axe head or bone and sinew from the animal).

10. Breakaway civ’s – small but possible chance if far enough away from your capitol and unhappy enough. As WES outlined but I’d add they would only join another civ if they had been part of that civ in the first place or your civ had not been at war previously with the neighbouring civ. If these two conditions can’t be met then they form independently.

11.Timeline – I think I’m the only one who voted for the earliest date in the poll! So no surprise that I want to be able to start in 7000bc (like in Craddle) and continue through to 2300 whatever. At the very least there should be an option to play the whole thing with all the bells and whistles. After all we want the greatest game of civ so far right? It will be more work, but in the end we’ll have a better game for it (maybe release a ‘lite’ version as well!). That’s from a player’s perspective and not a modders! As I talked about earlier if the first 3000yrs (from 7000bc) are filled in some more then I think it’s a period that is great to play, which leads me on to the next bit nicely.

12. Religion/culture- this bit could really help fill out the earlier periods and could be the main sell of this mod. The stuff on choosing a belief and following it would add so much to the game in many ways (diplomacy/trade/war). It could help decide civ specific unit’s/advance’s/tech’s, might even make it easier to structure? And of course it will add identity to your civ. This concept is very exciting and worth trying to do. I would just add that apart from the main religion’s being followed (Christianity/Islam/Hinduism/Buddhism) my ‘father’ insists he gets a look in, maybe under Paganism? After all who else but a Viking should be able to build longships? How about Shinto for a far eastern civ? Or even in fighting as in Catholics/ Protestants? This whole idea needs serious thrashing about and could be fantastic.

13. Upgrading units – I must admit I like the system in Craddle best, it gives me the choice of which units to upgrade rather than having to watch I have enough gold to build replacement units when all my old ones disappear! And something new – I like one aspect of the AOE games (shudder!), it’s the research into weapons/armour and the bonus it gives to units. From bronze ringmail to iron ringmail +1 defence, from iron ringmail to iron banded +2 defence etc. This kind of stuff could be added to units without having to replace sprites, maybe just a footnote somewhere. These could be the little advances that could fill the ‘spare’ turns syndrome. It could be added to non-military things as well e.g. plough/irrigation +1 food output, a whole load of things that impart small but needed improvements? It would all add to the individuality of the civ, which is not a bad thing.

I think that’s it so far.

[Locutus]

Thanks for posting that, child of Thor, great post

Civs that get too far ahead need to be slowed down

That's one of the core issues of the mod, so I'm glad we agree on this

1.More crime/more unhappiness as cities get further away from capitol and larger

Agreed, to some extend. But at some point (particularly with really large empires in the early game) you should need to resort to using entertainers and even slider setting. Contrary to improvements, this significantly slows down production/food/gold, therefore keeping you down while others can continue to grow and catch up much easier...

2.Newly conquered cities harder to keep under control.

Great idea, I like it VERY much myself Can easily be SLICed too...

3.Random disasters.

This is essentially what I already said myself. But keep those ideas coming! We need lots of actual events (such as HIV, Ban the Bomb, Fires, etc) and I'm not all that creative myself...

4.If one civ is running away with the game...

I think we ought to wait until the new diplo code is done before making too many decisions here, but as something to do before merging takes place (if the others civs are still to strong to be merged), that would be an option...

5.Wonders.

Since you really like wonders, what did you think of my list? Pretty different from what you're used to in any previous game/mod...
Hmm, the thing about wonders is that they VERY much make the rich richer and the poor poorer, something that's already way to much the case as it is. Restricting it to a single wonder a city would be good idea but I still think there should be a cap on the total number (per age). I often build wonders in 5-8 cities, I don't like the idea of building many wonders in a single city: very historically inaccurate. So it's quite possible to develop many cities without *too* much sacrifice in other areas... However, it might be interesting to have both a city cap *and* an age cap. That way you can build more wonders but you'll have to develop 20 cities for wonder building over the course of the game (with a max of maybe 5-8 per age) to be able to build 20 wonders during the entire game. We'll have to playtest that, I suppose.

6.Repairing units-how about a unit (medic?) or tile improvement (field Hospital?) that you can use/build anywhere.

I had the idea myself as well ages ago (and I doubt I was the first) but the problem with this can be expressed in a single word: AI

7. Trade/sell units.

Agree 100%.

8. Unconventional warfare

Well, I'd love to add more but I need good ideas. SAS: how should this work exactly? What would the difference between regular attack/bombardment and unconvention attack be? Sabotage infrastructure: how is this different from bombarding empty tiles? INT advances: might be worth considering, although city imps already sort of cover that (security monitor, castle, behavioral centre). Steal tech already exists. Again, I like the idea but I need good types of attacks...

9. Trade goods/Tiles as strategic resources

I agree. I'm not done thinking yet but I'm now tending towards having resources make units (much) cheaper, not a necessary prerequisite. I also want some units to have several advance prerequisites (i.e. Tank needs Internal Combustion and Oil Refining, that way no seperate Tank Warfare advance is needed and it spices up the unit tree a bit) and have a building prerequisite (i.e. Heavy Swordsman requires Forge). I hadn't though of terrain-prerequisites though, that's brilliant! You can't build Horses unless you've got Plains/Grassland in your city radius (or whatever), like with water->navel units. That makes *SO* much sense, why did noone think of this earlier?!.

10. Breakaway civ’s

Makes sense (Did Wes say that before? Must have overlooked that )...

11.Timeline

It would be nice, but the game would overall just take too long. That's what Cradle's for in the first place: focus on ancient, (almost) ingnore post-Medieval. I would certainly want to consider releasing seperate editions of the mod but 'your' edition would become the 'extra-long' one, not the default one.

12. Religion/culture

On the different forms of religion: I'm currently looking at the trio Christianity/Islam/Buddhism (might still change, I'm open for suggestions). It's by no means an exhaustive list but finding techs/buildings/wonders/units for all civs and balancing them isn't easy. The fact that the game won't allow you to have more than 64 buildings and wonders is a horrible limit as well, really keeping me down in this respect. Also, we wouldn't want all religions to be the same so I'm trying to give them specific properties (ala Civ3's CSAs): trade/science for Islam, peace/happiness (aka religious in Civ3) for Buddhism and maybe military for Christianity (Christianity was violent (Conquest of America, Crusades, Inquisition, Catholicism vs Protestantism, etc) but Islam wasn't exactly peaceful either so I'm not quite happy with this choice yet). I considered Confusionism but I fear that might be a bit Chinese-only (IRL at least) while the others are truly multinational (and a unique CSA, or rather RSA, is also hard to find). Shinto has the same problem as far as multinationality is concerned but I like it because finding a unit for it is extremely simple (Samurai ) and other things shouldn't be too hard either (except maybe RSA - isolationist? agricultural? militaristic?). Ideas welcome...

Also, does anyone know good ideas for buidings? Cathedral/Mosque are obvious but what about other religions? Shrine and Temple should IMHO be non-specific and kept as a 'pre-religion' buildings (representing 'parent' religions such as Hinduism, Judaism, Roman mythology). For Buddhism Monestary is the only thing I can come up with but that's not really religion-specific. For Confusionism, Shintoism, Hinduism, etc I'm bummed...

I would just add that apart from the main religion’s being followed (Christianity/Islam/Hinduism/Buddhism) my ‘father’ insists he gets a look in, maybe under Paganism? After all who else but a Viking should be able to build longships?

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here...

13. Upgrading units

I don't know what I may have implied earlier but no unit should disappear as a result of upgrading. The Craddle system could be tweaked a bit (it's IMHO annoying that you can't upgrade units afterwards if you couldn't upgrade everyone due to lack of gold).
I am considering an AoE like system actually, but to really make it work you'd have to add considerably more techs and the AI can't handle the system as it is. Also, it's an AWFUL lot of work to make and it might make it harder to decide whether or not it's wise to attack a certain stack or how many reinforcements you would need to protect your cities. Then again, that last argument is just as much an advantage as a disadvantage, that could actually be fun. If other have no real objections against it, I think it's worth a shot.

Again, thanks a ton for your post, lots of good ideas in there...

[Dale]

Locotus:

On wonders, how bout something like this for an idea (one that I was working on for my Alt-civ game).

Natural Wonders!
- Rare works of natural beauty such as Grand Canyon, Great Barrier Reef, Mt Everest, Amazon River, etc.
- From the industrial age, the Civ who "owns" this wonder gains tourist money, which increases with time to simulate more tourists in the world.
- If given to Civs that are behind (no-one knows where they are until the industrial age) then it gives them a wonder they normally would never have been able to get.
- Simulated as a terrain tile with it's own production/gold/science/move/etc settings.

What do you think?

[Immortal Wombat]

I would just add that apart from the main religion’s being followed (Christianity/Islam/Hinduism/Buddhism) my ‘father’ insists he gets a look in, maybe under Paganism? After all who else but a Viking should be able to build longships?

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here...

He's the Child of Thor...

So should there be a paganism 'religion' - Celts, Vikings, possibly even Romans and Greeks. The older Civs in the game.

[Locutus]

Dale, sounds like an interesting idea. Might not be very realistic to give small civs an edge but for gameplay it would be a nice addition.

Ben,
D'oh! Silly me...

Well, like I more or less explained above, I figured these sort of religions would be represented by the 'generic' religion. Early on in the game you can build 'shrines' and 'temples', later on you can will move on to 'more advanced' religions. Of course they're no such thing as 'more advanced' when it comes to religion but the religions I've selected so far *do* have 'parent religions' from which they originated and borrowed a lot (Christianity -> mostly Judaism, partly 'Paganism'; Islam -> Judaism; Buddhism -> Hinduism).

BTW forgot this in my last post but having both Catholicism and Protestantism rather than generic Christianity is a very bad idea IMHO, waaay to western-centric. First of all, there are other forms of Chrisitanity as well (Orthodox, Coptic, etc) but, more importantly, all other major religions have the same divisions so you would have to model all those as well: Shiite and Sunni Islam, Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism, etc (and since most of us know little to nothing about most of these different variants, it wouldn't add a great deal to the game).

[Master_Darque]

So should there be a paganism 'religion' - Celts, Vikings, possibly even Romans and Greeks. The older Civs in the game.

I think we should include the old religions. They were after all the major religions during the early days of civilization.

We could also reserve Wonders to a particular religion:
Pyramids to the Egyptian religion, Gutenberg's Bible to the catholic religion, Temple of Zeus to the Greeks and so on. It would add game balance as a single civilization will not be able to build all of the wonders just because it has the highest science and production.

Another idea to split the AI into various religions is to use the AI's Personality to drive which religion it should follow. If the personality changes, an event can be triggered to change the religion, in turn changing the possible tech tree the AI would follow. It is after all possible for a civilization to change the religion it follows.

[hexagonian]

Originally posted by child of Thor
6.Repairing units-how about a unit (medic?) or tile improvement (field Hospital?) that you can use/build anywhere. tactically you would want to protect this unit/tile as it would be vital in your supply line as a conquering civ. It of course could become a focus for counter attack, as it would (and should) disrupt your conquest. Still keep pw/gold as a slow regeneration but to quickly heal in the field is vital to an army. Just make the units/improvements expensive to build and maintain to keep some balance there.

This is already in place in Cradle, because the Fortification Tile Improvement will heal a unit in one turn. I have not been able to figure out how to disable the feature, so what I did was to give it a very high cost to build. Actually, it ended up being a nice feature for my setup. I still cannot get the AI to build them though, but it will take advantage of weakly defended and empty Fortifications to march in and get healed.

Originally posted by child of Thor
10. Breakaway civ?s ? small but possible chance if far enough away from your capitol and unhappy enough. As WES outlined but I?d add they would only join another civ if they had been part of that civ in the first place or your civ had not been at war previously with the neighbouring civ. If these two conditions can?t be met then they form independently.

Another somewhat unintentional effect that happens in Cradle - this works because of the occasional slave revolt that will hit an AI city. Set the MaxPlayer setting in the userprofile.txt to a high number, so that revolting cities will convert to a new civ. You can also alter the Barbarians strategy to use one of the other strategies (like militaristic) so that it will progress through the tech tree as a normal civ.

Originally posted by child of Thor
13. Upgrading units ? I must admit I like the system in Craddle best, it gives me the choice of which units to upgrade rather than having to watch I have enough gold to build replacement units when all my old ones disappear!

Locutus mentioned that he would like to adjust the coding so that an upgrade can occur any time after you get the prerequisite advance. Although only having a one-time opportunity to upgrade is a good way to force a player to carefully plan ahead (and I like that strategic element), since the AI upgrades for free, it would also be good to have an ongoing opportunity to upgrade a unit.